Once you break it down by age group, you find that the vast majority of people at significant risk from COVID voluntarily took vaccines shortly after they became available, so mandates could have had little effect in that cohort. Meanwhile, the mandates have lasted the longest on college campuses, where the risk calculus tilts most strongly against vaccination for COVID. So even if we're going to engage in a kind of naive "how many deaths from COVID were prevented" analysis as the sole criterion for evaluating the success or failure of mandates, the question is still potentially quite tricky. And that's without getting into the second order effects of throwing many people out of work without unemployment benefits, or cutting down the numbers of healthcare workers, both of which led to some number of preventable deaths which again would be difficult to calculate.
I am struggling to see how the risk calculus tilts strongly against vaccination for college campuses. What are you saying?
College campuses have staff and students of all ages. They should be a safe place for people even that are unable to get vaccinated due to medical issues. The risk of myocarditis is higher with a COVID infection than the vaccine.
> I am struggling to see how the risk calculus tilts strongly against vaccination for college campuses. What are you saying?
Adolescents and young adults are at highest risk for complications from the vaccine, and at the same time at almost the lowest risk of a severe case, a reduction in the odds of which is the only benefit conferred by the vaccines.
> They should be a safe place for people even that are unable to get vaccinated due to medical issues.
Mandates have nothing to do with this, because the vaccines do not prevent transmission or confer any herd immunity benefit whatsoever.
> The risk of myocarditis is higher with a COVID infection than the vaccine.
I don't believe this is true, given that a massive population study in Israel in 2020 pre vaccines found no heightened risk of myocarditis (although it does seem clear COVID infection can raise risks of cardiac/vascular issues more generally). However, even granting that it was the case, the comparison is rather pointless because the risks are not mutually exclusive, but rather additive.
> It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program.
This is a commonly repeated refrain, but it just exists to provide a comforting explanation for the fact that the U.S. security state decided to embark on a program of mind control experimentation on many unwitting and unwilling human guinea pigs. The truth is that as WWII wound down, we eagerly imported Nazi scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.
Wasn't it somewhat of a natural progression? The world was making multiple major discoveries, tons of new developments in pharma and psychology research, the space race, plus how Telecom, satellites and radio communications impact on spying etc.
It makes sense that spies would dream up some super drug that makes people talk. The El Dorado miracle pill to solve hard human problems... you combine that with technological exuberance of the era and cold war pressure, it makes sense.
You don't need to have Nazi imports or any one motivation to explain why they tried.
The circumstances of them unethically testing it on civilians is another matter.
Most new technologies are developed in secret as military tech first, then laundered into consumer applications. It's a decent bet they've been sitting on far more advanced AI models and algorithms for some time.
Obviously no one would care if Dimon had discussed Epstein's accounts and he was booted from the bank the next day, or even the next month. The whole issue is what was discussed when, and what Dimon's instructions were.
I suppose electing the CEO of the largest bank and a bailout recipient par excellence to the office of POTUS would finally dispense with the pretense that there is any significant distinction between Washington and Wall Street.
The idea that continuing with life as normal -- especially various forms of essential social contact and economic activity -- amounts to "murdering workers" when a somewhat bad respiratory virus is going around was one of the most risible bits of nonsense pushed into widespread adoption during the COVID response. Just because Doctorow may not mind extended social isolation with only his computer to keep him company, does not mean that everyone else was somehow uninformed if they weren't agitating for the same restrictions to be applied to themselves. Life is more than the pathologically assiduous avoidance of death.
The wealthy and powerful have read their Marx, and understand that for them to maintain their station requires that the vast majority of humanity be pressed into ever-worsening material conditions. What better way to get everyone to accept a lower standard of living, worse education for their children, and amped up surveillance and restrictions on their movements, than to sell it as a pandemic response that's all "for their own good"? The part where they forced huge swaths of small/medium sized firms out of business and consolidated their market share for huge corporations was just a bonus.
Nobody but Marxists read him and take him seriously. Their theory of mind are all universally godawful in that they expect everyone richer than them to think like a cross between a mustache twirling villain using their twisted and stunted vocabularies.
